Correlations Between Wins, Payroll, and Attendance Over Time

The students in my Sport Management class are reading Moneyball. One of the points made in the book is that attendance is more strongly correlated with wins than with payroll. I created the motion chart below to illustrate these relationships. But it looks as though things might have changed over the last 10 years or so. The correlation between wins and attendance is less than the correlation between payroll and attendance. Probably a variety of explanations. And, yes, I know I need to use regression with a bunch of control variables. But, hey, I'm learning Google Motion Charts, so give me a break. Change the horizontal axis to "Time" and change color to "Unique colors" and it makes more sense.